Phew! Scarlett Johansson thinks porn is OK

The Hollywood actress has spoken up about porn, ahead of her new film, Don Jon.
Dr Brooke Magnanti ponders whether we need to stop asking what watching
porn says about someone, and instead question what the porn we're making
says about us.

In this month's Marie Claire Johansson opens up on the touchy topic. "I think porn, like anything else, can be enjoyed. It can be productive for both men and women," she said. Although referring to her boyfriend in the movie Don Jon, "If I found out my boyfriend watched that much porn I would be totally flabbergasted, for sure."

I had to snigger. Has she really never come across (no pun intended) a man who categorised his porn by type, or kept it neatly filed in alphabetical order on a separate drive on his computer? Come on, surely we've all dated some version of this guy?

The central issue of the film is whether Jersey CurlbroJon - played by the film's writer and director, Joseph Gordon-Levitt - can leave behind his compulsive porn viewing in favour of sex with a committed girlfriend. Until he meets Johansson's Barbara, none of the girls match up to his expectations in the bedroom. 'You don't think I could make you happy if I wanted to?' she asks him saucily. But it doesn't exactly pan out that way. After making him wait a month before they do the deed she doesn't satisfy him, either. But he is torn, because he wants a relationship with her instead of just a one-night stand.

Now this is the point at which most people not trapped in a film plot might reach for the phone book and consult a relationship therapist, or try to engage their other half in playing out erotic fantasies, but the course of rom com never did run smooth. And anyway, Barbara is too busy staring pie-eyed at romantic fantasies and trying to shove Jon into the Perfect Boyfriend box to put any time into working with him on this anyway.

'Don't you think it's better when it means something?' she says, turning him down for sex, but of course it doesn't mean what she thinks it means either. (And Johansson really rocks the nasal East Coast hectoring in this film - her appealingly deep voice remains, for my money, her finest asset as an actor.)

But while the film focuses on Jon's relationship with porn and whether it's a problematic one, the real message is not about porn per se. Barbara's announcement of Anne Hathaway and Channing Tatum in some anonymous love story as 'meant to be' rings as flat as Jon's mindless collecting and viewing of erotica. It fills, it stupefies, but they are not engaging with it at all. In an interview with Jay Leno, Gordon-Levitt explains: 'I grew up in TV and movies, so I've always paid a lot attention to how what we see on TV and movies affects how we see the world,' he said. 'Especially with relationships.'

Don Jon is a film about the many ways in which we stop ourselves from having relationships with real people - be that Barbara's inability to accept there may be such a thing as a man who loves cleaning (she can't even look at him carrying a mop, or have a conversation about hoovering). Or Jon's parents inability to see their son as anything but the vehicle for their grandparenting aspirations. When Tony Danza as Jon's father screams at his son 'having a family is the greatest joy in a man's life. Everybody knows that!' you really feel the disjunction between what people say, and what they mean. Especially when weeks earlier Danza was ogling Johannsen's rack.

Look beyond theDom Mazzetti-lite Jersey boy obsessed with his tan and his biceps and his porn, and there is a truth about the ways in which all of us can and do objectify the people we love - whether it's by demanding a boyfriend be a white-knight romantic hero or by demanding a woman to be the flawless fulfilment of our every desire.

The idea, though, that there is a simple equation where intimacy is the good and only inverse of objectification is questionable, but it does raise interesting points. Right now, the focus of so much aspiration, anger, and concern is porn.

But porn only ever reflects a heightened reality of sexual and interpersonal relationships: perhaps we need to stop asking what watching porn says about someone, and asking what the porn we're making says about us.